What Janie does know is that she looks nothing like her parents, and it’s making her suspicious. Her name is Jennie Spring, and Janie thinks that she’s her-and spoilers, friends-she’s right, but Janie doesn’t know that yet. She goes so far as to try to make her name more memorable, daydreaming variations on spellings, and adding in additional letters to give it pizazz (“Jayne Johnstone” is a particular favorite of hers.) That all changes when one day, while eating lunch with her friends in the cafeteria, she sees a little girl’s face on a milk carton. Janie Johnson is, in her mind, an unforgivably boring 15-year old, almost 16-year old, girl. Andrews!)Īnyway, like basically every book we cover here, it’s been a while since I read this last, and I found it riveting on this reread.
All of May’s picks will be devoted to the books we read as kids but probably shouldn’t have. (Side note: by 12, my mom had all but given up on policing my reading material and even took me to the book store to buy “Valley of the Dolls,” which remains the single most influential book I’ve ever read, in my life, but we’ll cover that next week. I’m pretty sure she had forgotten she said no to this book, initially. So for the reasons above, I was told that I couldn’t read The Face on the Milk Carton because someone at church said it was inappropriate for children (probs because of the sexual overtones, which we’ll get to in a minute.) So obviously I checked the book out as soon as I could from the local library because libraries are fantastic, which obviously my mom drove me to and didn’t say anything when she saw me bring it home.
That ban in our house lasted all of 5 minutes, because - bless my mother - the amount of effort it would require for her to police us over content choices was far more than she was willing to devote away from her interests, which were mainly eating big bowls of salad and reading books in the living room while calling out, occasionally, for one of us to bring her the sip sip (diet coke) from the garage. She very half-heartedly tried to make my oldest brother stop playing Dungeons & Dragons at some point in our childhood because some random man in authority at the church put out an edict that it was bad for you.
Which meant that my mom kind of, sort of, paid attention when church leaders told her that certain pop culture things were bad for her children. So I’ve covered it a bit at Pajiba, but I was raised Mormon.
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